Re: Preference between files/patch vs PATCHFILES

On Tue, Jun 03, 2025 at 04:16:29PM -0700, Edward Sanford Sutton, III wrote:
>   Is there a preference between including a patch file in the ports tree vs
> downloading it as needed?
>   It seems less obtrusive to use PATCHFILES when the patch is available as a
> change already committed by upstream for future versions so that we don't add
> yet more files to the ports tree (which could use some serious file count
> pruning). Consumers of the patch may be slightly more impacted by time to
> separately download the patch than receive it as part of a ports tree. Unlike
> distfiles, patches are usually quite small but the count of small files adds
> up in a tree of over 30,000 ports. So many files lead to performance loss when
> extracting and searching through the tree. Some simple shell commands easily
> overflow due to counts and require rewriting or breaking into pieces.
>   The one advantage I see to /files is I have learned things from ports I was
> not looking at by grepping the tree without having to download/extract every
> port.

IMO, PATCHFILES should only be used for patches that already exist
for download for some other reason and are propertly versioned (see
shell/bash for an example).  They should not generally be used for
patches hosted by the porter as they become hard to view, increase
fragility, and risk the lost of history when the hosting site goes away.

I find the scaling argument fairly unpersuasive particularly given that
git grep removes most traversal overhead.

-- Brooks